ALBERT PINYA
Semper quæro

Fondazione Mudima_Via Tadino, 26. Milano
6.11.2025 – 16.12.2025

Pinya is considered one of the Majorcan artists of his generation with the most significant international exposure. An eclectic chronicler or an enfant terrible? Who can say. Figurative or abstract? It makes little difference. Pinya’s figuration is as abstract as his abstraction is figurative. An imagery free from hierarchy has accompanied Pinya since his earliest works and, over time, has become sharper and more direct. He has acquired a refinement that draws from the reservoir of art history, recovering and reintegrating passages from the historical avant-gardes and modernism, all the way to graffiti and the Neue Wilde. A postmodern fruit, perhaps. Pinya can play with different historical styles in the same work or refer to a single style and turn it inside out.

The separation between drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, video, and photography has long been blurred in his work, creating a fertile mix. For the first time, Albert Pinya will not present any paintings on canvas; the exhibition will feature only previously unseen works: from a monumental totem to small ceramic eggs (made in collaboration with Cuina de Fang in Ibiza); from stylized iron sculptures to deep stone engravings (produced at Mármoles Toldà in Algemesí, Valencia); tapestries, terracotta masks, and drawings on paper. Today, a completely new addition: weaving, especially tapestry, a technique where craftsmanship and creativity meet. Fabric, like ceramics and iron, represents a material through which to reinvent painting and forge new collaborations with masters of the craft. The two large murals on display were created with designer Marga Mayol and embroiderer Neus Oliver. Ceramics, on the other hand—already extensively explored through a nearly decade-long collaboration with Català-Roig—respond to a profound exercise in which forms and volumes are shaped by drawing inspiration from the primordial, the magical, the ancestral.

Pinya manifests himself within the museum space with all his intellectual prowess. While contemporary graffiti art, characterized by its use of symbols and words, has always been a source of inspiration, his latest influence—expressed in the rock carvings of Val Camonica—is clearly evident here. The more Pinya perfects his work, the closer he feels to primitive man. In stark contrast to artificial intelligence, he approaches the gestures of the past, and in this exhibition, he embodies a romantic and perhaps slightly nostalgic modus operandi. He reclaims artisanal processes and manual production as a subversive method of expression in an age where we attempt to replace thought with machines trained to do it for us.

Semper quæro, from the Latin semper desidera—always seeking—is both a stylistic and formal choice: on one hand, the decision to use an expression from a dead language; on the other, the combination of insatiability, curiosity, and experimentation that defines Pinya’s stylistic signature. An anachronistic artist.